Fox Town

Notwithstanding my assertion in my last post that we'd be pinned down at Great Sale by weather until this morning, we woke to a beautiful day yesterday. The wind had died down considerably, and the forecast improved, so we called Blossom first thing in the morning and collectively decided to get under way.

It was the right decision, as we had a very nice cruise, with some light chop on the nose on the eastward leg. We ended the day here, at the anchorage north of Fox Town, on Little Abaco Island (map), protected by Hawksbill Cays to the north. We're close to a cell tower, and there are some services ashore, although we abandoned plans to have dinner there when the small restaurant and grocery did not answer the phone. We surmised that, like many things in the Bahamas, they were closed on Sunday.


Our view to the north of the rocks west of Hawksbill.

Shortly after we dropped the hook, some locals came over in a skiff looking to sell us stone crab claws. We're not big fans, and did not want to go through the trouble of cooking and cracking them, but we knew Martin absolutely loves them, so we sent the Bahamians over to Blossom, the better part of a mile away. We heard later that they did buy some and that they were delicious. They were certainly fresh.

It was quite fortuitous that we had good weather yesterday and were able to get under way. I say that because the generator quit in the morning, right after we made the decision to leave, filling the engine room with an unmistakable burnt exhaust smell. I surmised a destroyed impeller. We went into power-conserving mode, but cruising for several hours let us put quite a bit of charge into the batteries, giving us a margin to get through last night if we had needed to.

As it turns out it was just a bad impeller, and, having done this drill once already (photos of the process in the linked post), I was able to fly through the repair without even cracking the manual. This time I drained enough coolant out of the heat exchanger beforehand to avoid getting it everywhere, and I topped it up with fresh when I was done. We also took the opportunity to clean out the sea strainer and change the fuel filter.

In a few moments we will weigh anchor and continue on to Green Turtle Cay. We'll likely anchor again tonight; if we'd not gotten the genny going, we'd instead have to wind our way into the shallow harbor and go to the marina there.